Author Archives: Genevieve Shanahan

David Piachaud of the London School of Economics last November published an article claiming to successfully refute Philippe van Parijs’ famous argument for basic income from his 1991 paper “Why Surfers Should be Fed: The Liberal Case for an Unconditional Basic Income.” He claims that the fatal flaw of van Parijs’ argument is that he does not take into account the crucial distinction between the voluntarily and involuntarily unemployed. Unfortunately, Piachaud overlooks or underestimates van Parijs’ lucid explanation of why both are entitled to the basic income. In this article, I try to show why van Parijs’ argument is unaffected by Piachaud’s critique.

On January 12, 2017, the Work and Pensions Committee of the UK Parliament held an oral evidence hearing on universal basic income, the official summary of which is now available online. It ultimately concludes that the measure “risks being a distraction from workable welfare reform” and urges “the incoming government not to expend any energy on it.”

Martin Sandbu last week offered a defence of universal basic income (UBI) in his Financial Times newsletter, Free Lunch. The article is part of a week-long series on automation and its economic effects.

Benoît Hamon, French presidential candidate for the Socialist Party, has offered a revised version of his much discussed basic income proposal, which has been seen by many as backpedalling on earlier, more ambitious plans.

In this article, Tracey Reynolds, a professor of social sciences at the University of Greenwich, surveys some arguments for and against basic income on gender equality grounds, and highlights the ways in which these arguments overlook the heterogeneous experiences of women. Specifically, she points to how black women have tended to relate to care work and reproductive labour in ways

Patricia Schulz, a Swiss lawyer and specialist in international human rights and gender equality, offers a short paper advocating for basic income from a feminist and gender equality perspective in the peer-reviewed journal Global Social Policy. In this article, Schulz argues that strong arguments for basic income “based on social justice, equality, dignity, freedom from want” could be bolstered by